From the Foreword
The collection of 18 poems in “Futuroplis” contemplate both present and future human “moments” as seen through a unique imagination: that of a highly visual, well-educated, intensely curious Deaf gay man. This imagination is conversant with Laurie Anderson, Roger Dean, Stephen Hawking, “Blade Runner,” Manhattan streets, “Pink Flamingos,” and Kraftwerk, but also with Buddha, Dante, and Botticelli. The poet uses all of these allusions (and others) to establish a special sensibility through which to communicate his wildly imaginative contemplations of a future. This sensibility speaks darkly, wildly, slowly, quickly, fearfully, and amorously. Sometimes it explores graphic cyber sexual/erotic fantasies. Sometimes old age, the cosmos, and its relationship to children of the future. Yet although these poems paint scenes that may only exist in a possible future, they are bred in the bone of the poet’s present experiences.
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This volume of poems hums with the work of an artist who has both a specific and a general love of the world and its future so …. Jump in! Join him! Enjoy the marvelous, difficult, painful, amazing life he sees! Participate in all his moments: the good, the bad, and the beautiful! The sad, the sensual, and the stellar! For, if you do, you too may wish to sense the world the way the lovely lines with which he leaves us lead:
“With awe, my heart expands with the wave of love.
I hug the universe with my open arms,
embraced warm
While my tip of DNA kisses the whole
universe as one.
I open my mouth wide and sing a song out loud:
“All is full of love. All is full of love. All is full of love. All is full of love.”
—Peter Haggerty
Associate Professor Emeritus
National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID)
From the book:
The Future
Listening to mesmerizing music of Kraftwerk,
Their sweet computer soundscapes
Seep into my circulating blood
As my eyes close into the world of the future.
Imagine myself as an elderly,
Maybe with a walking cane,
Sitting on a bench in the park.
Solitary man, I shall be,
Surrounded by children and young adults,
Playing and chitchatting here and there.
A robot strolls somewhere near by.
A girl laughs at something in her virtual reality mirror shades.
A hologram news about Mars landing shimmers behind a window across from me.
An artificial intelligent bird flies above me up
in the sky.
I shall ponder this wild and weird future world,
Strange though it may appear to be,
And ask myself, “Would this world look the same if I were a child instead of an old man?”
